Nature, Culture and GenderCarol MacCormack, Marilyn Strathern Cambridge University Press, 31 déc. 1980 - 227 pages Categories of analysis in the social sciences include the binary pair 'nature' and 'culture', as defined by western societies. Anthropologists have often imputed these categories to the world-views of non-western people and the construct has acquired the status of a universal. It has been further argued that culture (that which is regulated by human thought and technology) is universally valued as being superior to nature (the unregulated); and that female is universally associated with nature (and is therefore inferior and to be dominated) and male with culture. The essays in this volume question these propositions. They examine the assumptions behind them analytically and historically, and present ethnographic evidence to show that the dichotomy between nature and culture, and its association with a contrast between the sexes, is a particularity of western thought. The book is a commentary on the way anthropologists working within the western tradition have projected their own ideas on to the thought systems of other peoples. Its form is largely anthropological, but it will have a wide appeal within the social sciences and the humanities, especially among those interested in structuralist thought and women's studies. |
Table des matières
Nature culture and gender a critique | 1 |
Women and the dialectics of nature in eighteenthcentury French thought | 25 |
Natural facts a historical perspective on science and sexuality | 42 |
The power of signs gender culture and the wild in the Bolivian Andes | 70 |
Protosocial to adult a Sherbro transformation | 95 |
Gender sexuality and marriage a Kaulong model of nature and culture | 119 |
Images of nature in Gimi thought | 143 |
No nature no culture the Hagen case | 174 |
| 223 | |
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Expressions et termes fréquents
activity affine ancestral animal Anthropology argued associated Aymara Bakweri become behaviour biological body cannibalism child clan concepts concerned contrast cultivated death dichotomy distinction domestic domestic pigs dominant eighteenth century exchange exogamy fertility flutes forest garden gender Gimi girls groups Hagen Highlands hippopotamus husband ideas incest incest taboo individual initiation innate inside Kaulong kinship kore Laymi Lévi-Strauss London MacCormack male and female male spirit male-female Marilyn Strathern marriage married married couple marsupials masked meaning mediate men's menstrual blood metaphor moral mother myth nature and culture nature-culture non-human notion nurture opposition Ortner Papua New Guinea penis person physiological pigs plants pollution production relation relationship reproduction rites ritual role rømi Rousseau semen Sengseng sense sexes sexual sexual intercourse Sherbro social Strathern structuralist structure symbolic Thoma society thought Thumba transformation unmarried village wamb wild spirits woman women